Happy Valentine’s
Day!What better way to celebrate this day of romance than
with an album all about the loss of love and its effects thereafter!This is a reconstruction of the unreleased
Neil Young album Homegrown, the subdued and acoustic album primarily about
Young’s separation from his wife Carrie Snodgress.Originally meant to be released in 1975 as
the proper follow-up to On The Beach, it was shelved in favor of the more electric
and immediate Tonight’s The Night, never to see the light of day.Since most of the recordings reported to have
been featured on Homegrown are not available to listeners, this reconstruction attempts
to compile all available songs that were at least recorded during the Homegrown
sessions in order to present an approximate facsimile of what Homegrown could
have sounded like; luckily there is just enough to make a ten-song album.All songs have been volume-adjusted for
continuity and album cohesion.

Neil Young
has always been a man on the edge, a troubadour who embraced his inner-turmoil.This was a characteristic that informed his
music and ensured a long-lasting artistic integrity.Presented with mainstream success that
outshined his previous musical outlets with several hits from his 1972 album
Harvest, Neil Young choose to intentionally follow-up the album’s commercial
acoustics with more abrasive and difficult material to challenge his newly horizoned
audience.The subsequent albums were
called “The Ditch Trilogy”, formed by 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On The Beach
and 1975’s Tonight’s The Night.All three
projects shared the theme of loss and how Young dealt with it emotionally, as
Young lost three of his closest confidants in the course of making the albums.But “The Ditch Trilogy” is a misnomer, as it
should have been the Ditch Tetralogy: the fourth and final recorded project
during Young’s turbulent 1972-1975 era remained in his vault, as it not only
was too personal, but the sound of the album was too reminiscent of Harvest,
the album he strove to shy away from.Regardless,
it is the quintessential Ditch album, the final word of that era, although it was never
actually heard.

After being
fired from Crazy Horse years earlier, Young had given guitarist Danny Whitten a
second chance with a rhythm guitar spot in his backing band The Stray Gators
for the upcoming Harvest Tour.Unable to
perform competently due to his rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, Young
fired Whitten a second time.Within 24
hours, Whitten was dead, overdosed on alcohol and Valium.The effect on Young was immense, as he felt he
was responsible for Whitten’s death.The
initial outcome was Time Fades Away, recorded live on the subsequent tour,
mere months after Whitten’s death.The sloppy sound of anguish and denial—an artist in mourning with an inebriated backing band—Young has
since regretted the album, possibly due to the sound quality of the album,
recorded live by very early digital technology.Time Fades Away exists solely as a document of this troubled time in
Young’s career, which was only strengthened by an additional subtext of the tour: Young was growing apart from his wife Carrie Snodgress, the muse of his
Harvest.The freedoms of a rock star’s
wife did not seem to gel with the pressures of a grieving and overbooked rock
star, and the two became distant.

A brief
interlude from the turmoil occurred as a hopeful writing and recording session with
a reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in mid-1973, resulting in the
genesis of the Human Highway project (which was also reconstructed on this
author’s blog).Unfortunately, a second casualty
temporarily ceased the project, as Neil Young and CSNY’s long-time roadie Bruce
Berry overdosed on heroin, a habit that was introduced to him by none other
than Danny Whitten.Leaving Crosby,
Stills and Nash to their own battling egos, Young recorded possibly the rawest
and most anguished recording of the 1970s, Tonight’s The Night, between August
and September.A painful ode to both Whitten
and Berry, the album was perhaps too raw and Young sat on the completed
recording for the remainder of the year while road-testing the material, toying
with the mixing and sequence, finding the best way to release the album.This cathartic tour for a soon-to-be-released
record became a stereotype for rock band excess, and as Snodgress later recollected,
was the beginning of the end of her marriage with Young.

With a
more-or-less completed album in his back pocket and a slew of even newer songs,
Young returned to the studio in February 1974 and recorded the third of his
Ditch Trilogy, On The Beach.While more
refined than the previous Ditch albums, anguish still loomed over the songs
while still soaked by the drug excess of the previous year’s tour.With Young both emotionally and physically
absent, the lonely and hungry eye of the rock star’s wife looked in other
directions; surely he had taken other lovers while on the road, why couldn’t Carrie?As the album was being released, Young's realization that Snodgress had been cheating on him unleashed a flurry of new
songs about their disintegrating relationship and the break-up of their family.Young was given a surprise opportunity to road-test his new material with
a re-reunited CSN&Y, on a much-hyped national tour through the rest of 1974
that the band later called “The Doom Tour”.During rehearsals for the tour, Young recorded one of his new laments, “Pardon
My Heart”, as well as an acoustic backstage duet with The Band’s Robbie
Robertson on another of his new compositions “White Line”.

The
miserable CSNY tour ended that fall, and in November Young went into Quadrafonic
Sound Studios in Nashville to capture the heartbroken ballads he had written
about Snodgress, including “Star of Bethlehem” and “Frozen Man”.Temporarily returning home to his ranch,
Young found Carrie with her lover and he kicked her out; it was officially over.After this heart-crushing break
from the recording sessions, Young returned to Quadrafonic in December, tracking a number of bleak yet razor-sharp songs of romantic despair that seemed to
balance between western-tinged, full-band renditions and solo acoustic
performances, some also tracked at his home studio Broken Arrow.Songs recorded during these sessions include:
“Separate Ways”, “Love is a Rose”, “Love Art Blues”, “Homefires”, “The Old Homestead”,
“Deep Forbidden Lake”, “Homegrown”, “We Don’t Smoke It”, “Vacancy”, “Try” and “Give
Me Strength.”In January 1975, final
recordings for this new project, now called Homegrown, were tracked in LA at
The Village Recorder, including “Little Wing”, “Kansas”, “Mexico” and “Florida.”The exact tracklist of Homegrown was never
published but it is believed to include any number of the aforementioned 17
songs from the Quadrafonic, Broken Arrow and Village Recorder sessions, as
well as “Pardon My Heart” and “White Line” recorded during The Doom Tour.

While Young
was uncertain about releasing Homegrown because of its brutal honesty (he even
claimed he couldn’t sit through the entire album), the label was excited for
Young’s return to a more delicate sound after his recent abrasive albums.In typical Neil Young fashion, that was never to be.In the oft-repeated story, Young previewed Homegrown
to a party of friends; after the album finished, the rough cut of Tonight’s The
Night—still unreleased from 1973's work—played afterwards.More impressed by the later work, The Band bassist Rick Danko
suggested to release Tonight’s The Night instead of Homegrown.And that is exactly what Young did that June of
1975 and Homegrown as it’s completed album has never been heard outside a
select few.

Only a
handful of the various songs from the Homegrown sessions have been released
over the years, wetting fan’s appetites for what was purported to be Neil Young’s
strongest and most emotionally vulnerable album. Many have tried to reconstruct Homegrown, but
the truth is that not only do we not know the official tracklist, but less than half of the
material is even available to us officially or even unofficially!Young himself only recently performed some of
the material live for the first time, in recent decades.In an effort to retain the best possible soundquality
and historical accuracy, my reconstruction of Homegrown will focus only on
recordings dating from the mid 1970s, as well as only studio or soundboard
recordings.With this criteria, that
reduces the number of available songs to ten, which luckily is enough to
make a complete album.While not
precisely the mythical Homegrown, this could be viewed as an approximation
culled from the Homegrown sessions, what the album might have sounded like.

The album
begins with the title track, “Homegrown”.For the actual unreleased album, the recording would have been more
downbeat and probably Western; since that recording is unavailable, we’ll use
the Crazy Horse re-recording dating from November 1975, from the album American
Stars n Bars.Next is the delicate “Little
Wing” and majestic “The Old Homestead”, both taken from Hawks and Doves.Somber “Love is a Rose” from Decade follows,
with Side A concluding with “Love Art Blues”; while the unheard Homegrown album
version was probably a solo acoustic recording, here we will use the slick full-band
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live recording from CSNY 1974.Side B opens with “Star of Bethlehem” from
American Stars n Bars.The studio “Give
Me Strength” allegedly sounded much like the eerie “Will To Love”; since
unavailable, we will use a live recording from 1976, taken from the GF Rust Chrome
Dreams bootleg.Following is the
exquisite “Pardon My Heart” from Zuma and “Deep Forbidden Lake” from
Decades.The Homegrown album version of “White
Line” would have been an acoustic duo with Robbie Robertson; since unavailable,
we will end the album as it began, with the Crazy Horse re-recording from
November 1975, taken from the GF Rush Chrome Dreams bootleg.